Nomlex

Overview

NOMLEX (NOMinalization Lexicon) is a dictionary of English nominalizations
developed by the Proteus Project at New York University under the direction
of Catherine Macleod. NOMLEX seeks not only to describe the allowed complements
for a nominalization, but also to relate the nominal complements to the
arguments of the corresponding verb. The complements of the nominalization
are described in terms of the COMLEX Syntax verb subcategorization patterns
of its associated verb. See the COMLEX Syntax Manual for information on
the verbal complements. We identify both the main verbal arguments (subject,
direct object, and indirect object), which may map into a variety of nominal
positions, and the oblique verbal complements, which map more directly
into nominal complements. The argument correspondences are specified through
a combination of explicit information in the lexical entries and general
linguistic constraints on the correspondences. We have 1025 entries of
several types of lexical nominalizations, including over 1000 distinct
words. These words were selected from lists of frequently appearing nominalizations
in our corpus (which includes Brown and the Wall Street Journal). There
are multiple entries for certain graphonyms. For example, "deduction"
has two NOMLEX entries ("deduction1" and "deduction2"), one corresponding
to the verb "deduct" and the other corresponding to the verb "deduce".
We released the alpha version of NOMLEX on January 15, 1999, a small update
to the alpha version (the Alpha 2 version) on March 12, 1999. Finally,
the 2001 version was released on October 19, 2001. The latter is
downloadable from this website (see below) and freely available for use
by all. We would appreciate feedback from this usage to
macleod@cs.nyu.edu.

Many nominalization appear with support verbs: "launch an attack",
"take a walk". We have designed a extended nominalization entry which
captures information about these support verbs (Proteus Project Memorandum
02-005).
We are now starting a project to annotate all the nominalizations in the Penn
Tree Bank; this will allow us to extend and validate the entries in NOMLEX